What's at stake in the Chicago Architecture Biennial

Architecture is both high sport and spectacle in Chicago, which means the stakes are high for the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial, opening at the Chicago Cultural Center on Oct. 3.

“You fuck this up and you'll set Chicago architecture back for years,” Stanley Tigerman told Chicago Architecture Biennial co-curator (and locally based Graham Foundation Director) Sarah Herda shortly after the event was announced in June. The eminence grise of the city's architectural scene painted a grim litany of the city's failed international architectural initiatives—including the 2016 Olympics bid and the 1992 World's Fair, although his real touchstone was the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. Louis Sullivan lamented that the seminal event actually turned back the clock five decades on Chicago architecture's 19th-century innovations.

We're now just days from the opening and there's still some anxiety about how it will turn out. But there are several things that we can say for sure.

First, nobody in Chicago is rooting against its success. You can write it off to provincial pride, but even off the record, everybody in the close-knit architectural community subscribes to Tigerman's blunt early advice—that its failure would be a bad thing for the city and its vaunted reputation in the design world.

Second, it's going to be bigger than anyone (even its organizers) initially imagined. That's because almost every architecturally related event in Chicago this fall will be branded with a “CAB” partner label of some sort, which is somewhat disingenuous, since Chicago hosts literally dozens (if not hundreds) of lectures, exhibits and similar events every year. Even regularly scheduled events like the Chicago Architecture Foundation's annual Open House Chicago (Oct. 17 and 18) will be cast as part of the biennial.

As a plus, the biennial's website has become the go-to place to discover what architectural events are happening—a digital central clearing house, if you will, that's been long needed for architecture aficionados.

Third, even the main events, including the building-wide installations in the Chicago Cultural Center and the temporary installations of kiosks around the city, may remain works in progress after the Oct. 3 opening. That's partly because of the enormity of the event. The almost 70,000 square feet of installation space at the Cultural Center is a lot bigger than what Herda and co-curator Joseph Grima are used to—both previously ran New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture, which is just 1,000 square feet. Herda now heads the Gold Coast's Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, where she has significantly increased the use of its landmarked Madlener House for exhibits, but it's only 9,000 square feet.

Photo

One of the building-wide installations in the Chicago Cultural Center

The title of the venture—and don't call it a theme, Herda dictates—is “The State of the Art of Architecture,” taken from a 1977 Chicago conference convened by Tigerman. Intentionally vague, it doesn't seem to take a specific position—other than to plainly state the status of architecture as art. Giving a quick summary while overseeing the installations, Herda says, “The state is diversity, almost a cacophony.”

One of the inherent problems with the biennial form is that an exhibition format makes architecture “accessible” as a highly aestheticized, even fetishized form. Architecture at its best, arguably what Chicago has excelled at, is an art form that integrates the highest aspirations of the aesthetic with the mundane and practical demands of the pragmatic. Even the three-dimensional installations will exist temporarily in a rarefied context that makes their evaluation as real architecture difficult at best.

“They're fabulously unruly beasts,” says Zoe Ryan of the biennial format. “But they're an opportunity to ask questions.” Ryan, the Neville Bryan Curator of Design at the Art Institute of Chicago, led the relatively new Istanbul Design Biennial last year. She also has curated the David Adjaye exhibition at the Art Institute, which forms an important part of the overall event (see below). She sees the CAB as an important opportunity for Chicago. “There's so much potential to spark a wide and diverse dialogue.”

Trying to survey the state of the entire profession of architecture through a variety of exhibits and events over three months is a tall task, one that all its backers recognize. “It's an impossible ambition,” admits Chicago Cultural Commissioner Michelle Boone, whose leadership has been integral to making the event happen. Now we just have to see how the next three months play out—and start planning the next one for 2017.

Photo

Ed Keegan

The Chicago Cultural Center

THINGS TO LOOK FOR

The Chicago Cultural Center as hub of activities

More than 100 exhibitors will have their work on display in the Chicago Cultural Center, headquarters of the entire Chicago Architecture Biennial. Even the exterior is getting a makeover, with the building's windows reimagined with the design patterns of other Chicago windows, created by the Chicago/New York-based collective practice Norman Kelley. Chicagoan John Ronan, best-known for his Poetry Foundation building, has created an outdoor lounge based on leaves at the Washington Street entrance. The interior will host a wealth of installations, including a welcoming space inside the Randolph Street entrance by Mexico City-based Pedro & Juana, and a loftily inspiring cathedral effect of inexpensive metal studs on the building's ramp, designed by New York-based SO-IL.

Park Kiosks

The CAB commissioned four kiosks that will form a legacy in Chicago's parks in years following the exhibition. One was chosen in an international competition, the other three were coordinated with each of Chicago's architecture schools (Illinois Institute of Technology, School of the Art Institute of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago).

Photo

A rendering of the Ultramoderne lakefront kiosk

The UIC kiosk is on display in Millennium Park, and the SAIC design (eventually to be erected at Montrose Beach) is represented by stone blocks that relate to its formal construction.

The competition winner (rendering above), by Providence, R.I.-based Ultramoderne, is located along the lakefront by the Field Museum.

Photo

Ed Reeve, courtesy of Adjaye Associates; Steve Hall, Hedrich Blessing

David Adjaye and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, far right

David Adjaye at the Art Institute of Chicago

The first major retrospective of Tanzanian-born, London-based architect David Adjaye opened in the Modern Wing of the Art Institute just two weeks before the biennial. Often mentioned as a leading contender to be architect of the Obama Presidential Center, Adjaye's star is rising as his design for the National Museum of African American History and Culture (above) is slated to open on the Mall in Washington, D.C., next year.

Chicago Architecture Foundation competition

Four and a half blocks south of the Cultural Center, the Chicago Architecture Foundation (CAF) will display the results of an international competition to imagine a downtown Center for Architecture, Design and Education—providing a new home for the CAF, the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat and a new high school for design and allied arts. The mayor reportedly has expressed interest in creating such a place, so this “ideas competition” may give a glimpse of things to come.

Photo

Tom Harris/Hedrich Blessing

Stony Island Art Bank

Stony Island Art Bank

Artist Theaster Gates has timed the opening of his newest community-based venture to a part of the CAB. At 68th Street and South Stony Island Avenue, he has created a wonderful arts venue from an abandoned, yet architecturally distinguished, bank building. It houses an eclectic collection of materials, including the Johnson Publishing archives, the vinyl record collection of “godfather of house music” Frankie Knuckles, and 60,000 glass lantern slides from the Art Institute and the University of Chicago. An installation by Barcelona-based architect Carlos Bunga takes center stage in the two-story main space, a cardboard construction that's interesting, but pales next to Gates' careful renewal of the original space, which retains what was left of the original architectural detail, set in contrast with simple new materials to make the place whole for its new purpose.

Get out of town: Racine, Wis., and Farnsworth House

Chicago's architects have had far-ranging influence for more than 12 decades, and the CAB is helping to focus attention on at least two sites that aren't within the boundaries of the city. Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Plano, Ill. (about 50 miles away), and Frank Lloyd Wright's headquarters complex for S.C. Johnson in Racine, Wis. (about 75 miles away), will be more publicly accessible during the biennial through planned transportation and extended hours. Both are highly significant works of the 20th century and well worth the treks.

Edward Keegan is author of three publications on Chicago's architecture.